H2020 SURE-Farm project: Towards sustainable and resilient EU agricultural systems

A novel resilience framework for agricultural systems has been developed in collaboration with the entire SURE-Farm consortium. This framework addresses the complex and growing challenges facing agricultural systems and focuses on three resilience capacities (robustness, adaptability, and transformability) as key determinants of resilience.

The framework has already been widely disseminated among the scientific public and stakeholders. Regarding possible future scenarios for EU agricultural systems, five scenarios based on socioeconomic trajectories have been developed and presented to the scientific public. Multiple primary data collection methods have been implemented in the case study regions (CS), including structured and piloted farmer surveys on risk perception, risk management, and resilience capacity, biographical narratives with farmers about their adaptive behavior, and in-depth interviews with farmers to understand their learning and self-organization capacity.

In addition to primary data, secondary data on the adoption of the Risk Management Toolkit, as well as weather and yield data for insurance policymaking, are being collected. Farm demographic trends and challenges have been reviewed in 11 SCs, and interviews with farmers and key informants have been conducted in 11 SCs. Focus groups to collect data for the Farm Demographic Assessment Tool have also been completed in 5 SCs. The ResAT tool is being applied to CAP and local legislation in 11 SCs, with interesting findings already presented during a multi-sector workshop in the Netherlands.

An Integrated Assessment (IA) toolkit has been developed for assessing the resilience and provision of private and public goods in agricultural systems, including various models. Participatory workshops on assessing current sustainability and resilience are being organized in 11 SCs. An approach has been conceptualized to integrate the findings from different work packages in each SC region into a holistic analysis. This approach will be based on the five generic resilience principles and address both resilience-enhancing and resilience-limiting attributes. The retrospective analysis in 11 SCs will be used to identify implementation roadmaps (Who? What? When?). The SURE-Farm project employs multiple co-creation processes throughout its various stages, including digital co-creation through a dedicated area on the SURE-Farm website, local co-creation, and a core co-creation group composed of public and private actors who provide feedback on approaches and outcomes. An international scientific committee also evaluates key outcomes.

The key results at this stage of the project are:

• The creation of a framework that allows for a detailed diagnosis of the resilience of an agricultural system, for example, simultaneously identifying an environment that limits resilience to social and economic challenges and an environment that enhances it to environmental challenges, or vice versa.
• Five scenarios have been developed in the context of resilience.
• We found that most agricultural systems perceive generational renewal as a future challenge for the resilience of agricultural systems.

We conclude that current policies and strategies contribute primarily to robustness and adaptability, but less to transformability. We find that modeling tools are available to assess robustness and adaptability, but less so for transformability.